Starting grad school log

I’ve had a blog since 2016 but haven’t done much writing mainly because of lack of motivation and it didn’t seem important to me. But these days I feel more inclined to write about my projects and what I’m learning at grad school. To put it more concretely, it is better if I list down my reasons:

  1. I’ve always wanted to spend time at Recurse Center, which is an educational retreat for programmers, and they advise “Recursers” to blog regularly, and I thought, maybe I should do that in grad school itself to get the most out of it.
    First, write a blog! Even if no one else reads it, writing prose is a great way to crystallize concepts in your mind and deepen your understanding.
  2. I think there are lots of parallels between programming/research and artistic work (Hackers and Painters), and if a singer or painter just worked on their projects and didn’t release them in public, there would be no positive reward feedback loop and no one would recognize their work. Moreover, it is a bit boring to just code alone and not share your progress and output with others. If I may use some RL terminology, I hope to receive dense positive reward signal to train my policy function responsible for learning and building projects.
  3. In continuation to the last point, great work in software happens in bands and solo performers are rare (though indie hackers are on the rise). There are lots of interesting people on the internet and I would like to collaborate remotely with them in the future. I believe blogging should help my work get known more easily.
  4. I confess that I’ve learned more from reading blog posts than from reading research papers. Research papers are awesome but a lot of work to read for people not working in that sub-domain of a narrow domain. Blogs, on the other hand, are an excellent medium to publish your research/projects in form of an easy story and you don’t need to worry about getting it published in a journal or conference.
  5. Lastly, I’ve seen a lot of other people do it, so I’ll succumb to my human instinct of copying people whom I find interesting professionally.

I wanted to cite some tweets to support my above conjectures but I’m not able to find them now. Grad school logs will be on the left menu.

Update: September 5th 2019

Postmortem

I stopped doing grad school blogs after trying it for a month. It turned out that I was not able to blog everyweek, can't imagine how people blog everyday. I felt the content of my blogs was not good, they just had too much information and it became an unnecessary overhead. I want to try doing relatively longer-form writing (like essays) on topics that I'm reading about these days. Will post something soon.